Chris Beatson

Personal Profile

Chris J. Beatson

I'm a technology expert and strategist that helps small and independent broadband service providers enable and manage the Internet of Things for their customers. I have the ability to find interesting and disruptive ways for them to deliver every day services; like video, and cloud based products.

When I'm not at work to spread technology to rural parts of America, I help coach my son's hockey team and cheer along side my wife at other sporting events our two boys are involved in. On too few occasions I enjoy the outdoors, I cycle on and off road, and try (badly) to play hockey with other aging guys in and around the RTP area here in North Carolina.

I was born in the UK where I lived in a few different places (Slough, Buxton, Sheffield, and then Chiddingfold) then eventually found my way here to Cary, NC where I've been since 2000. I arrived along with my family to Columbia, MD in 1986 where I spent my first couple of years of American school at Centennial High School. Another move two years later brought us to Grapevine, TX where I finished school at Grapevine High School. From there I went out to Lubbock, TX and attended Texas Tech University where I studied Design Communication and then Computer Science on and off for a few years.

While I was at Texas Tech I became increasingly interested in technology, networking, and eventually the Internet. After I spent some time at Texas Instruments and a local technology VAR (MicroAge) I took a job at the local newspaper - The Lubbock Avalanche Journal - where I helped to automate the process to get their daily news content off an old main frame system and onto their public websites each night ( lubbockonline.com and redraiders.com ). We even did a few of the first webcasts from Texas Tech Football games. Not to age myself too much, but those were done over dial up connections !

I spent the next few years at the City of Lubbock where I was tasked with all of their Internet and Intranet related initiatives. I worked on some fun projects across lots of different departments and City run Institutions. I helped enable and build the first e-commerce systems, automated a multitude of internal processes and workflows, and helped the Police department with systems to track and identify various types of wrong-doers. Each project exposed me to different technologies and was different enough to keep the work interesting and enjoyable.

Toward the end of the millenium my wife and I decided it was time to make a move away from Lubbock so we could be closer to family and have more career opportunities; medical for her, and technology for me. The Research Triangle area was a natural choice with multiple hospital systems, technology companies, and innovation. We moved to Cary in 2000, started our family -two boys-, and continue to love the area to this day.

When we moved to North Carolina I began working for NeoNova and have been involved with them ever since. When I first joined NeoNova we were in the process of spinning out of Nortel and were still huddled up in a couple of rooms on one of the Nortel Campuses in RTP. Shortly after I came on board we moved to our own space and begun to build the business to help small rural Telephone Companies provide Internet services to their subscribers. This was before DSL, Cable modems, Fiber to the home, and all the luxuries of broadband that we enjoy today. ISDN and Nortel One Meg Modems were the closest resemblance to residential broadband that existed. It was predominantly a dialup society.

Our product was, and continues to be, a managed service that covers all aspects of the Broadband Service Provider business on a wholesale basis. Our customers use our technology and support staff to help them, manage, optimize, and operate their broadband business. These days that means much more than it used to with today's increasingly more connected world.

In the early days of NeoNova I helped design and build the core of our cloud based customer management and provisioning platforms and centralize our technology solutions into a multi-tenant scalable environment. The platform and product set we built helped us gain scale and grow the business significantly in the first few years.

With rapid growth we had the good problem to determine how to onboard the business efficiently and successfully. I shifted my focus from development and lead the effort to build processes and automation in support of the on boarding efforts. I've always been detail oriented, so figuring out how to build those processes and manage the project plans and teams involved was a transition I enjoyed. Every on-board project was a new challenge and different enough to require constant solutions to problems, technical knowledge, and new resulting processes.

In 2008 our company changed ownership when we were purchased by a couple of Venture Capital firms on the West Coast (Azure Capital and Bridgescale Partners). There were a few management changes and challenges as a result, but I continued to be increasingly involved with the direction and strategy of the company and was promoted to the executive team as Vice President of Project Management and Software Engineering.

Over the next few years we continued to grow the company and diversify the products and services we provide to our customers. As an investor owned company we had to focus on growth while we maintained the service levels and customer satisfaction that was a hallmark of our service. Ultimately we were successful in both respects and were purchased by NRTC in July of 2013.

In September of 2015 I was named CTO of NeoNova. In that role I'll help set the direction for products, strategy and partnerships, as well as the various technical platforms and systems.

NeoNova is now a wholly owned subsidiary of The National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC). We represent their broadband products and services arm. So far our directive is the same and our goals and commitments to our customer base have not changed. The biggest change comes from being part of a cooperative; we're now owned by our customers who are members of NRTC.